Rob Zombie’s The Munsters movie has yet to showcase the new Eddie and Marilyn, leaving their roles in his adaptation highly questionable. While Zombie is better known for his R-rated violent horror films, the director is stepping into a new genre as he tackles the PG-rated horror-comedy classic The Munsters. The family-friendly movie will be in color with plenty of returning iconic characters from The Munsters’ original 1960s sitcom, but Zombie has still yet to confirm a few key figures.
After months of letting audiences in on step of the way for his production of The Munsters, Zombie released the first official teaser trailer for his upcoming 2022 movie. The trailer featured a fun twist on The Munsters' iconic opening credits where Zombie proved his iterations of the Munster family characters to be faithful to the original. However, only three characters were depicted in the teaser: The vampire matriarch Lily Munster (Sheri Moon Zombie), her Frankenstein’s monster husband Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips), and her Count Dracula father Grandpa (Daniel Roebuck).
While Herman, Lily, and Grandpa are, in fact, the more prominent characters of The Munsters’ original series, Zombie’s teasers thus far are still missing Eddie and Marilyn, the other two key members of the Munster family. Eddie Munster is Herman and Lily’s young part-vampire, part-werewolf son, whose kindhearted mischief serves as a primary motivation in many of the original Munsters episodes’ storylines. Marilyn Munster, the niece of Lily and granddaughter or Grandpa, is the family’s human character, who is ironically satirized as “plain” and abnormal by the Munsters’ Transylvanian standards. Both Eddie and Marilyn add important nuance to The Munsters’ family dynamic and larger satire of suburban America, so their absence in Zombie’s teasers and images hasn’t gone unnoticed.
There have oddly been unsubstantiated rumors of Evan Rachel Wood playing Marilyn and Jacob Tremblay playing Eddie in The Munsters reboot movie, but neither Zombie nor Universal has confirmed any such casting. However, the original Eddie Munster actor Butch Patrick and second Marilyn Munster actress Pat Priest from the 1960s sitcom are both confirmed to be involved in Zombie’s 2022 movie. The extent of Priest’s role and how exactly Patrick will be involved are unclear, but at least the nostalgic spirit of the iconic Eddie and Marilyn will be present in The Munsters film, even if they’re not actually portraying their original characters.
While the absence of Eddie and Marilyn Munster suggests a completely new angle for tackling The Munsters characters, Zombie’s teaser trailer hints that his movie may actually be a prequel to the original series. At the end of The Munsters movie’s teaser trailer, Lily, Herman, and Grandpa sit down on a couch in their 1313 Mockingbird Lane house looking lost, with Daniel Roebuck’s Grandpa asking, “Well, now what?” Nearly every piece of furniture in The Munsters trailer has a tag on it as well, suggesting the family has just sent over these belongings as they officially move from Transylvania to America. If Zombie’s The Munsters reboot truly is a prequel, Eddie and Marilyn’s absence could be explained by the former not having been born yet and the latter not having moved in with them.